daveharty

You might very well succeed in keeping the opponents from playing in a spade partial--they might instead opt to collect the many +300s and +500s you will be offering up by overcalling this kind of hand.

I'm not really happy about it but I will pass.

1. yes 2. yes 3. club

I think 3NT was an entirely reasonable bid by you. If your partner insists on criticizing your bidding, you might ask him why he didn't rebid 2D with his hand.

First, a suggestion. Rather than trying to describe a hand in a roundabout way like "KJxxxx and a relatively balanced hand with 5 more HCP scattered throughout", could you just include the hand (or as close an approximation as possible if you can't remember it, but that shouldn't be the case if the hand was played on BBO)? It's much more concise and provides a helpful visual reference for those of us who might want to respond to your questions, and we don't have to wade through different variations for which our answers might be very different. Also I believe it serves a useful function for you as it encourages more precise pattern recall. Re. your first hand: your question about whether your LHO was right depends on what exactly he meant. If he meant that you would find very little support in the bridge community for opening 3C with a six card suit under any circumstances, of course he is wrong. On the contrary, given a hand like Fluffy suggests (say, xx xx xxx KQJ9xx) you would more likely be hard-pressed to find someone would wouldn't open 3C, at least at favorable or equal vulnerability. Especially if you play a system where 2C is your strong artificial bid, 3C becomes almost by necessity your "weak 2 bid" in clubs. If, on the other hand, he meant that you would find little support for your personal criteria for opening on a six card suit--"first seat and relatively decent clubs"--then he might well be right, especially if this is an example of "relatively decent". The club suit you give is NOT relatively decent, it's quite poor. Preemptive bids should have a very high offense:defense ratio, as Fluffy suggests; your partner is never going to be able to make intelligent decisions over your preemptive bids if they have virtually no definition aside from moderate length in the suit opened. Again, it's hard to answer your other questions without seeing your specific hand, but in third seat, I might very well open 3C on a hand that I wouldn't open 3C in first seat for various reasons, so the hand might well have been appropriate for a third seat opener. Re. your second hand, you didn't include anything about the system you and your partner were playing, which is often useful if not crucial information. If you play 2/1, then 3NT was almost certainly not the right call, as you were in a game-forcing auction already with no need to go jumping around. 2NT would have left more room for exploration and still left open the possibility of playing 3NT if slam looked unlikely. If you are instead playing something "Standard American" based, then you have to establish a game force by other means. However, your partner's suggestion that 4C was the correct bid is completely bizarre (especially if you were playing matchpoints) as it blows by your most-likely game contract, 3NT. And it certainly isn't Gerber.

I don't think so. Opening a skewed NT should be done to avoid rebid problems, or because you have most of your points jammed into your short suits, or to solve some other problem; this North hand has a comfortable rebid on most continuations after opening the nice five card major. Opening 1NT might have led to a better result here, but that's resulting.

For what it's worth, you are correct about SJS being part of SAYC, rather than WJS, although it's hard to suss that out by just looking at the card itself. You have to look at the official SAYC system booklet under the section "Responses and Later Bidding After a 1H or 1S Opening" to find a mention of it. Re. the actual merits of the two treatments, SJS are great for slam bidding when they come up, which is almost never. WJS hands are much more common, so on a frequency basis, it's hard to argue against them; but SJS advocates will say that those hands can be handled via other ways, while showing the SJS type hand is much more difficult if you play WJS. I have little experience playing SJS, they are pretty rare around here except for those old-timers who still play "Charlie Standard" from the 1950s; so if you were in my area, it might be easier to adopt WJS simply because there will be a lot more people around to advise you on it.

The "blame" should go to whomever misunderstood what the double meant. If the partnership agreement is that the double is "takeout", i.e. minors, then obviously North should take it out and bid diamonds. If, on the other hand, the partnership agreement is that the double is "cards" or something, maybe a hand that was going to rebid 2NT to show a balanced 11 count or so, then South shouldn't double, because that's not really what he has. I know what I prefer, but it's not really possible to assign blame without knowing what the partnership's agreements are. What probably happened is that there WAS no agreement in place; well, now there is, hopefully. NS won't have this particular problem again.

That was the context of the OP. Of course, if you have methods, use them.

[hv=pc=n&e=skj9876hak43da5ct&d=e&v=e&b=6&a=1s2h3d(NFB%2C%205-10%20with%20good%20diamonds)p]133|200[/hv] Worth another bid after partner's negative free bid? If so, what?

I think I would just bid 5C. I don't want to give the opps any room to discover how good their spade fit is. I think the standard meaning of 5C is "I want to play 5C."

My reasoning, at any rate, was based on an at-the-table belief that the likelihood of any strain other than diamonds being best was quite small, particularly in light of the double. Of course RHO doesn't always have four spades for the double, but he often will. And even if we do have a spade fit, I thought there might be a decent chance it would play better in diamonds from partner's side with the lead coming from the doubler. As far as taking partner out of the picture, I'm not sure how bad a position we are putting partner in by telling him we have a huge diamond fit. Doesn't that leave him in a better position if, say, LHO bids 4H or 5C? All that being said, of course I considered 1S (along with 4D and 2NT, my other candidates--I did not consider the splinter). I thought it was a close decision and could be convinced that my choice wasn't best.

4+ unless 4=4=3=2. 4-4 minor hands are opened 1D.

Truth.

I felt the same way, and this is the action I chose at the table. I will wait a little while before I reveal the result.

[hv=pc=n&e=sat87ht92dqj7654c&d=e&v=e&b=6&a=pp1dd]133|200[/hv] Agree/disagree with the initial pass? Now what?

Not enough. I should have opened 1NT, that would have kept us out of trouble.

A few months ago in a local game I picked up a hand so big I took a picture of it. Not the best hand I ever had, but probably the most HCP.

:(

I agree with gwnn about playing penalty all the time, I would rather just consistently play Landy or something and not waste precious space in my limited hard drive. In the one partnership where we do play different systems against weak and strong NT, we draw the line at 15 hcp: if the range includes 15, we treat it as strong, unless it's specifically 12-15 (which I have only encountered once and we were lucky enough to notice the odd range before the round). I think the reason we decided on that line of demarcation was that around here, very few people play the traditional Precision 13-15 range; almost everyone who deviates from a 15-17 NT is playing either 12-14 or 14-16, so there really aren't any borderline cases.

Very hard to answer without knowing partner's preempt style. With a couple of my partners, I would probably bid 5C or at least strongly consider it, since it is a lock they have eight clubs and little to no defense. With some partners though, or with an unknown sitting across from me, I would pass; there's a decent chance of cashing two clubs or partner having some assorted useful junk.

This kind of hyperbole doesn't really add anything to the discussion, IMO. It's easy to be definitive about what's right when all hands are in view. You might be right about 2D being the long-term winner with this hand; but only some combination of experience and sim results can really "answer" that. Many people who chose to overcall, including Justin, have admitted (or at least suggested) that this is a close decision.

It has been said many times before: no matter how the ACBL tinkers with the masterpoint structure or the requirements for each "rank", masterpoints are little more than an attendance award for many people. Of course it is possible to find some correlation between masterpoints and skill--if someone racks up, say, 1500 points in a year, it's likely they are a pretty good player--but knowing someone's masterpoint total tells us very little about their actual strength as a player. Unfortunately, unless and until the ACBL implements something more like the Elo ratings used in chess and soccer, it's the only metric we have, aside from reputation. jillybean: Are your regional KOs really 6 or 7 brackets? We're lucky to get four... :(

If I could play the dummy as well as Fred or Justin I would overcall too!

I will echo what was said by MrAce and Phil, especially about this being a good problem, because it is VERY close to the borderline for me. But 2 level vulnerable overcalls are one of those areas where I really don't shade things; I need either a great 5 card suit AND sound opening values, OR a good six card suit and reasonable values. Here the suit is okay, you aren't going to get doubled on the basis of an opponent holding good trumps, but you don't have a very good chance to compete for the partscore and making a not-very-preemptive overcall like 2D might give the opps additional descriptive options (like LHO bidding a nonforcing and constructive 2H, where he would have been forced to bid 1NT forcing absent the overcall and then been guessing over a 2S rebid; or maybe the opps have a convenient way to distinguish between various 3 and 4 card raises now).